tonic water

is a brainchild of Schweppe’s, the company that first produced commercially viable artificial soda water (the concept had been pioneered by the English physician William Falconer in the late 1770s). In 1790, and in partnership with Nicholas Paul and Henry Albert Gosse when he moved operations to London, former watchmaker Johann-Jacob Schweppe (1740–1821) introduced three different soda waters to the British medical community and public: table soda, soda for kidney patients, and soda for patients with serious digestive complaints. Each differed in the intensity of carbonation and alkali content.

Schweppe focused all of his efforts on those products, making him and his partners wealthy to a point that Schweppe sought retirement. He sold the majority of his interest to a group of British businessmen who continued operations but focused their attentions on beating the growing influx of competitors and supplying increased demand. Consumer popularity proved that no competitor could beat the combination of low price and high quality of Schweppe’s waters. In 1824, the partners retired and sold J. Schweppe & Company to majority shareholder and managing director Robert Brohier, his brother R. J. Brohier, and Richard Annesley Sparkes. This partnership had a different vision: one that coupled medical breakthroughs with popular demand and changing palates.

Quinine, a South American extract of cinchona tree bark, was isolated and named by French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou in 1820. Traditionally, cinchona was fermented into a beverage by indigenous peoples as a remedy for the chills, a common symptom of malaria. As early as 1631, Italian physicians applied cinchona for the same purpose. But it was Pelletier’s and Caventou’s study that sparked broader interest and application, especially in 1851, when it took on a very practical and palatable form in the hands of Schweppe’s, who immediately began development of a commercial recipe for a bottled chinchona drink.The Schweppes partners finally patented, in 1858, commercial “Indian tonic water” that combined its successful soda water with quinine and sweetening. Paired with gin and touted as healthful, it already had been adopted as a daily quencher for British subjects living in tropical areas. The commercial distribution of tonic water in the 1870s vaulted the Gin and Tonic toward the top of the drinks menu, standing shoulder to shoulder with the John Collins and the Tom Collins. See Gin, Tonic; John Collins;, Tom Collins.

Finally, it should be noted that most modern tonic waters have greatly reduced levels of quinine and greatly augmented levels of sugar compared to the nineteenth-century version.

Miller, Anistatia, and Jared Brown. “The Perfect Mixer.” Mixology Magazine, special supplement, 2010.

Walker, Kim, and Mark Nesbitt. Just the Tonic. Kew, UK: Royal Botanic Gardens, 2019.

By: Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown